from Southport Pier to Brighton Pier, drifting towards my 50th year on this planet (Earth)

Intersecting journeys

A few weeks ago we were down south visiting my parents. A moment came, at the top of the Devil’s Dyke, when we looked north west across the Weald, across most of the landscape I still have to walk:

More recently, we attended Journey of the Bride, the opening of an exhibition by Alice Lenkiewicz. There were readings, by Alice herself and a crew including Andrew Taylor, Cath Nichols, Janine Pinion, Robert Sheppard, Patricia Farrell, Tom George, and Ursula Hurley. And, like some grizzled beyond-hope Cinderella, even though I was meeting most of these people for the first time I got to read myself – some of my Bypass Pilgrim stuff, and a new blank-verse piece based on the part of this journey that involved walking around the perimeter of Pinewood Studios.

And went away thinking about how journeys intersect. There had been Robert Sheppard, referring to a ride on one of Brighton’s buses named after famous people. Andrew Taylor had actually lived in Woking, a place I had recently walked past, who had written a series of poems set there. A tiny picture of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the corner of one of Alice’s drawings, reminding me of the time I stumbled across a production in a Buckinghamshire village.

Tom George, fresh from a workshop in the National Wildflower Centre, a place we had driven past on the way to hospital, his Urban Beauty Shock praising a ‘solo rebel seed’ wildflower. Tiny barbs of connection in the richness of all the reading.

Then we went to Scotland for a holiday. Sometimes it looked like this,